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Monday, April 1, 2019

How Inuit Parents Teach Kids To Control Their Anger

Remarkably subtle. We truly need to understand this and to shape our own education around this methodology. It needs to become part of our children's education and this association with the Inuit creates a great background story to reinforce it as well

Children who are angry are the source of most of our behavioral issues and simply teaching them how to manage that anger is an excellent foundation. From there it is surely much easier to address external issues triggering that anger.

Truth is that responding to any problem with anger is mostly counter productive at best and uncommonly successful so must be used carefully.

For more than 30 years, the Inuit welcomed
anthropologist Jean Briggs into their lives so she could study how they
raise their children. Briggs is pictured during a 1974 visit to Baffin
Island.

Jean Briggs Collection / American Philosophical Society

Back in the 1960s, a Harvard graduate student made a landmark discovery about the nature of human anger.

At
age 34, Jean Briggs traveled above the Arctic Circle and lived out on
the tundra for 17 months.

There were no roads, no heating systems, no
grocery stores. Winter temperatures could easily dip below minus 40
degrees Fahrenheit.

Briggs persuaded an Inuit family to "adopt" her and "try to keep her alive," as the anthropologist wrote in 1970.

This story is part of a series from NPR's Science desk called The Other Side of Anger.
There's no question we are in angry times. It's in our politics, our
schools and homes. Anger can be a destructive emotion, but it can also
be a positive force.

At the time, many Inuit families lived similar to the way their
ancestors had for thousands of years.

They built igloos in the winter
and tents in the summer. "And we ate only what the animals provided,
such as fish, seal and caribou," says Myna Ishulutak, a film producer and language teacher who lived a similar lifestyle as a young girl.

Briggs
quickly realized something remarkable was going on in these families:
The adults had an extraordinary ability to control their anger.

"They
never acted in anger toward me, although they were angry with me an
awful lot," Briggs told the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. in an interview.

Myna Ishulutak (upper right, in blue jacket) lived a
seminomadic life as a child. Above: photos of the girl and her family in
the hunting camp of Qipisa during the summer of 1974.

Even just showing a smidgen of frustration or irritation was considered weak and childlike, Briggs observed.

For instance,
one time someone knocked a boiling pot of tea across the igloo, damaging
the ice floor. No one changed their expression. "Too bad," the offender
said calmly and went to refill the teapot.In another
instance, a fishing line — which had taken days to braid — immediately
broke on the first use. No one flinched in anger. "Sew it together,"
someone said quietly.

By contrast, Briggs seemed like a wild
child, even though she was trying very hard to control her anger. "My
ways were so much cruder, less considerate and more impulsive," she told
the CBC. "[I was] often impulsive in an antisocial sort of way. I would
sulk or I would snap or I would do something that they never did."

Briggs, who died in 2016, wrote up her observations in her first book, Never in Anger.
But she was left with a lingering question: How do Inuit parents
instill this ability in their children? How do Inuit take tantrum-prone
toddlers and turn them into cool-headed adults?

Then in 1971, Briggs found a clue.She was walking on a stony beach in the Arctic when she saw a
young mother playing with her toddler — a little boy about 2 years old.
The mom picked up a pebble and said, "'Hit me! Go on. Hit me harder,'"
Briggs remembered.

The boy threw the rock at his mother, and she exclaimed, "Ooooww. That hurts!"

Briggs
was completely befuddled. The mom seemed to be teaching the child the
opposite of what parents want. And her actions seemed to contradict
everything Briggs knew about Inuit culture.

"I thought, 'What is going on here?' " Briggs said in the radio interview.

Turns
out, the mom was executing a powerful parenting tool to teach her child
how to control his anger — and one of the most intriguing parenting
strategies I've come across.

No scolding, no timeouts

It's
early December in the Arctic town of Iqaluit, Canada. And at 2 p.m.,
the sun is already calling it a day. Outside, the temperature is a balmy
minus 10 degrees Fahrenheit. A light snow is swirling.

I've
come to this seaside town, after reading Briggs' book, in search of
parenting wisdom, especially when it comes to teaching children to
control their emotions. Right off the plane, I start collecting data.

I
sit with elders in their 80s and 90s while they lunch on "country food"
—stewed seal, frozen beluga whale and raw caribou. I talk with moms
selling hand-sewn sealskin jackets at a high school craft fair. And I
attend a parenting class, where day care instructors learn how their
ancestors raised small children hundreds — perhaps even thousands — of
years ago.

The elders of Iqaluit have lunch at the local senior
center. On Thursdays, what they call "country food" is on the menu,
things like caribou, seal and ptarmigan.

Across the board, all the moms mention one golden rule: Don't shout or yell at small children.

Traditional
Inuit parenting is incredibly nurturing and tender. If you took all the
parenting styles around the world and ranked them by their gentleness,
the Inuit approach would likely rank near the top.(They even have a special kiss for babies, where you put your nose against the cheek and sniff the skin.)

The
culture views scolding — or even speaking to children in an angry voice
— as inappropriate, says Lisa Ipeelie, a radio producer and mom who
grew up with 12 siblings. "When they're little, it doesn't help to raise
your voice," she says. "It will just make your own heart rate go up."

Even if the child hits you or bites you, there's no raising your voice?

"No,"
Ipeelie says with a giggle that seems to emphasize how silly my
question is. "With little kids, you often think they're pushing your
buttons, but that's not what's going on. They're upset about something,
and you have to figure out what it is."

Traditionally, the women and children in the community eat with an ulu knife.

Traditionally, the Inuit saw yelling at a small child as
demeaning. It's as if the adult is having a tantrum; it's basically
stooping to the level of the child, Briggs documented.

Elders I
spoke with say intense colonization over the past century is damaging
these traditions. And, so, the community is working hard to keep the
parenting approach intact.

Goota Jaw is at the front line of this effort. She teaches the parenting class at the Arctic College. Her own parenting style is so gentle that she doesn't even believe in giving a child a timeout for misbehaving.

"Shouting,
'Think about what you just did. Go to your room!' " Jaw says. "I
disagree with that. That's not how we teach our children. Instead you
are just teaching children to run away."

And you are teaching
them to be angry, says clinical psychologist and author Laura Markham.
"When we yell at a child — or even threaten with something like 'I'm
starting to get angry,' we're training the child to yell," says Markham. "We're training them to yell when they get upset and that yelling solves problems."

In
contrast, parents who control their own anger are helping their
children learn to do the same, Markham says. "Kids learn emotional
regulation from us."

I asked Markham if the Inuit's no-yelling
policy might be their first secret of raising cool-headed kids.
"Absolutely," she says.

Playing soccer with your head

Now
at some level, all moms and dads know they shouldn't yell at kids. But
if you don't scold or talk in an angry tone, how do you discipline? How
do you keep your 3-year-old from running into the road? Or punching her
big brother?

For thousands of years, the Inuit have relied on
an ancient tool with an ingenious twist: "We use storytelling to
discipline," Jaw says.

Jaw isn't talking about fairy tales, where a child needs to
decipher the moral. These are oral stories passed down from one
generation of Inuit to the next, designed to sculpt kids' behaviors in
the moment.Sometimes even save their lives.

For
example, how do you teach kids to stay away from the ocean, where they
could easily drown?

Instead of yelling, "Don't go near the water!" Jaw
says Inuit parents take a pre-emptive approach and tell kids a special
story about what's inside the water. "It's the sea monster," Jaw says,
with a giant pouch on its back just for little kids.

"If a
child walks too close to the water, the monster will put you in his
pouch, drag you down to the ocean and adopt you out to another family,"
Jaw says.

"Then we don't need to yell at a child," Jaw says, "because she is already getting the message."

Inuit
parents have an array of stories to help children learn respectful
behavior, too. For example, to get kids to listen to their parents,
there is a story about ear wax, says film producer Myna Ishulutak."My parents would check inside our ears, and if there was too much wax in there, it meant we were not listening," she says.

And parents tell their kids: If you don't ask before taking food, long fingers could reach out and grab you, Ishulutak says.

Inuit parents tell their children to beware of the
northern lights. If you don't wear your hat in the winter, they'll say,
the lights will come, take your head and use it as a soccer ball!

Then there's the story of northern lights, which helps kids learn to keep their hats on in the winter.

"Our
parents told us that if we went out without a hat, the northern lights
are going to take your head off and use it as a soccer ball," Ishulutak
says. "We used to be so scared!" she exclaims and then erupts in
laughter.

At first, these stories seemed to me a bit too scary
for little children. And my knee-jerk reaction was to dismiss them. But
my opinion flipped 180 degrees after I watched my own daughter's
response to similar tales — and after I learned more about humanity's
intricate relationship with storytelling.

Oral storytelling is
what's known as a human universal. For tens of thousands of years, it
has been a key way that parents teach children about values and how to
behave.

Modern hunter-gatherer groups use stories to teach sharing, respect for both genders and conflict avoidance, a recent study reported,
after analyzing 89 different tribes. With the Agta, a hunter-gatherer
population of the Philippines, good storytelling skills are prized more
than hunting skills or medicinal knowledge, the study found.

Today
many American parents outsource their oral storytelling to screens. And
in doing so, I wonder if we're missing out on an easy — and effective —
way of disciplining and changing behavior. Could small children be
somehow "wired" to learn through stories?

Inuit parenting is gentle and tender. They even have a special kiss for kids called kunik. (Above) Maata Jaw gives her daughter the nose-to-cheek Inuit sniff.

"Well, I'd say kids learn well through narrative and explanations," says psychologist Deena Weisberg
at Villanova University, who studies how small children interpret
fiction. "We learn best through things that are interesting to us. And
stories, by their nature, can have lots of things in them that are much
more interesting in a way that barestatements don't."

Stories
with a dash of danger pull in kids like magnets, Weisberg says. And
they turn a tension-ridden activity like disciplining into a playful
interaction that's — dare, I say it — fun.

Inuit filmmaker and language teacher Myna Ishulutak as a
little girl. Anthropologist Jean Briggs spent six months with the
family in the 1970s documenting the child's upbringing.

Back up in Iqaluit, Myna Ishulutak is reminiscing about her
childhood out on the land. She and her family lived in a hunting camp
with about 60 other people. When she was a teenager, her family settled
in a town.

"I miss living on the land so much," she says as we
eat a dinner of baked Arctic char. "We lived in a sod house. And when we
woke up in the morning, everything would be frozen until we lit the oil
lamp."

I ask her if she's familiar with the work of Jean Briggs. Her answer leaves me speechless.

Ishulutak reaches into her purse and brings out Briggs' second book, Inuit Morality Play, which details the life of a 3-year-old girl dubbed Chubby Maata.

In
the early 1970s, when Ishulutak was about 3 years old, her family
welcomed Briggs into their home for six months and allowed her to study
the intimate details of their child's day-to-day life.

Myna Ishulutak today in Iqaluit, Canada. As the mother
of two grown boys, she says, "When you're shouting at them all the time
they tend to kind of block you. So there's a saying: 'Never shout at
them.' "

What Briggs documented is a central component to raising cool-headed kids.

When
a child in the camp acted in anger — hit someone or had a tantrum —
there was no punishment. Instead, the parents waited for the child to
calm down and then, in a peaceful moment, did something that Shakespeare
would understand all too well: They put on a drama. (As the Bard once
wrote, "the play's the thing wherein I'll catch the conscience of the
king.")

"The idea is to give the child experiences that will lead the child to develop rational thinking," Briggs told the CBC in 2011.

In
a nutshell, the parent would act out what happened when the child
misbehaved, including the real-life consequences of that behavior.

The
parent always had a playful, fun tone. And typically the performance
starts with a question, tempting the child to misbehave.

For example, if the child is hitting others, the mom may start a drama by asking: "Why don't you hit me?"

Then
the child has to think: "What should I do?" If the child takes the bait
and hits the mom, she doesn't scold or yell but instead acts out the
consequences. "Ow, that hurts!" she might exclaim.

The mom
continues to emphasize the consequences by asking a follow-up question.
For example:

"Don't you like me?" or "Are you a baby?" She is getting
across the idea that hitting hurts people's feelings, and "big girls"
wouldn't hit. But, again, all questions are asked with a hint of
playfulness.

The parent repeats the drama from time to time until the child stops hitting the mom during the dramas and the misbehavior ends.

Ishulutak
says these dramas teach children not to be provoked easily. "They teach
you to be strong emotionally," she says, "to not take everything so
seriously or to be scared of teasing."

Psychologist Peggy Miller,
at the University of Illinois, agrees: "When you're little, you learn
that people will provoke you, and these dramas teach you to think and
maintain some equilibrium."

In other words, the dramas offer kids a chance to practice controlling their anger, Miller says, during times when they're not actually angry.

This
practice is likely critical for children learning to control their
anger. Because here's the thing about anger: Once someone is already
angry, it is not easy for that person to squelch it — even for adults.

"When you try to control or change your emotions in the moment, that's a really hard thing to do," says Lisa Feldman Barrett, a psychologist at Northeastern University who studies how emotions work.

But if you practice having
a different response or a different emotion at times when you're not
angry, you'll have a better chance of managing your anger in those
hot-button moments, Feldman Barrett says.

"That practice is
essentially helping to rewire your brain to be able to make a different
emotion [besides anger] much more easily," she says.

This
emotional practice may be even more important for children, says
psychologist Markham, because kids' brains are still developing the
circuitry needed for self-control.

"Children have all kinds of
big emotions," she says. "They don't have much prefrontal cortex yet. So
what we do in responding to our child's emotions shapes their brain."

A lot has changed in the Arctic since the Canadian
government forced Inuit families to settle in towns. But the community
is trying to preserve traditional parenting practices.

Markham recommends an approach close to that used by Inuit
parents. When the kid misbehaves, she suggests, wait until everyone is
calm. Then in a peaceful moment, go over what happened with the child.
You can simply tell them the story about what occurred or use two
stuffed animals to act it out."Those approaches develop self-control," Markham says.

Just
be sure you do two things when you replay the misbehavior, she says.
First, keep the child involved by asking many questions. For example, if
the child has a hitting problem, you might stop midway through the
puppet show and ask,"Bobby, wants to hit right now. Should he?"

Second,
be sure to keep it fun. Many parents overlook play as a tool for
discipline, Markham says. But fantasy play offers oodles of
opportunities to teach children proper behavior.

"Play is their work," Markham says. "That's how they learn about the world and about their experiences."

Which seems to be something the Inuit have known for hundreds, perhaps even, thousands of years.

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18 years old, having cleaned out my HS library, I concluded the only ambition worth having was becoming a great genius. An inner voice cheered. Yet it is my path I have shared much to the Human Gesalt. Mar 2017 - 4.56 Mil Pg Views, March 2013 - Posted my paper introducing CLOUD COSMOLOGY & NEUTRAL NEUTRINO described as the SPACE TIME PENDULUM. Sep 2010 -My essay titled A NEW METRIC WITH APPLICATIONS TO PHYSICS AND SOLVING CERTAIN HIGHER ORDERED DIFFERENTIAL EQUATIONS has been published in Physics Essays(AIP) June 2010 quarterly. 40 years ago I took an honors degree in applied mathematics from the University of Waterloo. My interest was Relativity and my last year there saw me complete a 900 level course under Hanno Rund on his work in Relativity. I continued researching new ideas and knowledge since that time and I have prepared a book for publication titled Paradigms Shift. I maintain my blog as a day book and research tool to retain data, record impressions, interpretations and to introduce new insights to readers.